Hello everyone, and welcome back to my month-long tribute to my favorite underrated villains of fiction. Already I have covered one of my favorite madmen of Batman's rogue's gallery (# 5), a genocidal madman hiding in a comedy aimed at families (# 4) and one of the most devastating evil empires in Star Trek history (# 3), but today I'm looking to draw attention to easily my favorite Disney villain of all time:

I have no idea why The Princess & The Frog isn't more popular. Maybe it had some trouble given its difficult pre-production and Disney's less than stellar track record with race relations. Maybe a more modern Disney fairy tale just didn't sit right for fans of mystical, far away lands. Or maybe it's because it's one of the last 2D animated Disney films in an increasingly 3D world.

I may only be in 2D, but I can still kick your ass.

It's a fun movie, and one of their best-written. It was the first of Disney's most recent trend of movies that are fair in the development of both the princess and the prince as well-rounded characters who both evolve throughout the course of the film (a trend I wholeheartedly support). The development of the relationship between Tiana and Prince Naveen is well paced and believable, and the supporting cast of characters is solid, fun, and relatable. And it has a half-decent soundtrack too.

And some good old-fashioned Disney slapstick insensitivity to the mentally and physically disabled.

But my favorite part of the film has always been in its villain, Dr. Facilier.

There have been a lot of great Disney villains, so I'm not going to blame anyone for how Dr. Facilier got lost in the shuffle. There are plenty of greats to choose from, I just find it a shame that he's given more attention. So, how has he ranked as my favorite Disney villain? Let me count the ways.

1. Facilier is one of the scariest Disney villains. While many Disney villains can easily be called evil, most of them are blustery and a little bumbling. Dr. Facilier is cold and calculating, very rarely letting his anger get the better of him as is most villains' folly. Top it off with his frequent communing with all sorts of dark magic, and he's one of the few Disney villains who I think could sneak into your nightmares.

2. He's got a great sidekick. While most heroes, and for that matter, villains in Disney movies are given sidekick characters that are basically there to sell stuffed animals. Dr. Facilier isn't having any of that. His sidekick is his own sentient shadow, which silently acts as a character of its own, fulfilling Facilier's will in some very cool, and very creepy, manners.

3. He's willing to go that extra villainous mile. (SPOILER ALERT) People die all the time in Disney movies. Those people are called parents and villains. There are some characters who are, by their very nature, immortal, namely the heroes and the sidekicks, because it would sure as hell be depressing if one of those wacky characters got killed, right? Well, Dr. Facilier apparently never got that memo. When attacked by Tiana's friend Ray, a Cajun-accented firefly, Dr. Facilier does what comes naturally to a truly evil villain. He swats Ray out of the air and steps on him, killing him. You can hear the crunch. It's awful. Sure, Ray gets a poignant death monologue a few moments later, but the sheer unexpectedness of this act makes it one of the most evil things pulled off by a Disney Villain.

Hardcore.

4. He's voiced by Keith David. This may be my own bias talking, since Keith David has always been one of my favorite character actors (from The Thing, There's Something About Mary and They Live, among many, many other places), but screw it, this is my list and I want to get it out here. Keith David's sweet, but powerfully deep voice (which he also put to expert use in Disney's short-lived cartoon Gargoyles) gives Facilier a smooth, seductive nature that makes him every bit as fun to listen to as he is to watch. And he has a very impressive singing voice, which brings me to my last point:

5. Seriously, just watch this video. If this doesn't sell you on his awesomeness, I don't know what will.

If you've never given The Princess & The Frog a chance, I'd say give it some consideration. It's a really fun one.

So, dear readers, are there any other fans of Dr. Facilier and The Princess & The Frog? Are there any other underrated villains you'd love to see get more respect? Sound off in the comments below!And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my month-long tribute to my favorite underrated villains of fiction. Already I have covered one of my favorite madmen of Batman's rogue's gallery (# 5) and a genocidal madman hiding in a comedy aimed at families (# 4), but today I'm looking to draw attention to one of my favorite evil empires in science fiction:

This is just the show the evil empire is in, not the actual evil empire. Eh, moving on.

I'm a big, and admittedly quite recent fan, of Star Trek. After giving in to some curiosity and childhood memories of enjoying the show, my wife and I spent close to a year marathoning every episode of Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise. We've enjoyed the shows ups and downs (admittedly, many of its downs feel like pulling teeth, while others are unintentionally hilarious), but haven't really immersed ourselves in the fan culture, so there's every chance every bit of praise and analysis I've got to offer in this article is wrong, and if it is, I apologize. Much like I did in my article for The Mad Hatter, I am approaching this one as coming from the perspective of a casual fan.Star Trek: Deep Space Nine strikes me as the middle child of the Star Trek series. While The Original Series and Next Generation are loudly praised and Voyager and Enterprise are loudly derided (more than they deserve, usually, though often every bit as much as they deserve), Deep Space Nine just sits right there in the middle, notable really as "the Star Trek that didn't really trek the stars". So, it had a liar's title working against it.

And it spent a lot of time focusing on the Ferengi, who are admittedly a pretty polarizing race to watch.

I didn't have a lot of hope for it when it first came time for Fi and me to watch it. After all, we'd just marathoned The Next Generation from top to bottom, and despite its more than occasional aloofness and the fact that it started losing its mind some toward the end, it was still a solid, well-written scifi series that really lived up to a lot of the potential that the Star Trek idea had always promised. Also, it had Patrick Stewart, which is always a good first step.

This man is awesome.

Still, we started watching Deep Space Nine, and despite a lot of initial hesitance, especially after a relatively weak, if inoffensive, first season, we were engrossed. The space station setting that we initially feared would hold the show back really added new depth to the show, as it allowed for enduring, complicated plotlines that couldn't be resolved by just moving on to the next planet of the week like a shipboard series would allow. Actions had consequences that would last and affect characters, and entire planets, for seasons to come, creating deep characterizations and morally ambiguous conflicts that made this show feel far more real than any other Star Trek. It also did a good early effort at modern serialized television, with more than half the show's seasons building to a galaxy spanning war that in itself leads to some of the darkest episodes in Star Trek history.

Anyone else love In The Pale Moonlight?

Of course, if you're going to have a season's-spanning war against an enemy that can challenge the Federation, the Klingons & the Romulans simultaneously, that enemy is going to have to be impressive, and The Dominion fit the bill.

Don't mess with them.

Hailing from the distant Gamma Quadrant on the other side of the galaxy, The Dominion act as an anti-Federation. They are a collection of races brought together by the shapeshifting Founders to rework the galaxy in their own image. Much like the Federation, they will initially contact new worlds with diplomacy, asking if they would like to join in their empire. If this doesn't work, they will send in their soldiers to bring the planet in by force, or, if necessary, completely eliminate the world to serve as an example to nearby systems. Through these actions they have managed to create one of the biggest, and most dangerous, empires in the Star Trek canon. The three main races that make up the onscreen Dominion representatives each bring something unique to the show:

The Founders, a.k.a. Changelings, are the brains behind the Dominion, and are responsible for many of their most nefarious schemes, as one of their main techniques for conquering a region is to replace influential individuals on a world with their duplicates, working to sabotage and otherwise weaken a world and making it ripe for the conquering. The actions of a handful of these infiltrators have been powerful enough to wipe out certain species' entire fleets.

The Vorta are The Dominion's administrative race. Simultaneously cheerful and remorseless, they will just as easily offer a compliment as send wave after wave of soldiers to their death. However, their skills in diplomacy are also unrivaled, as their clever negotiations managed to create alliances and non-aggression pacts with many Alpha Quadrant races that would allow for a more devastating conflict than the region had ever seen.

Perhaps the most fascinating, and pitiable, race of The Dominion are their soldiers, The Jem'Hadar. Cloned and bred for the sole purpose of killing, they mature to adulthood in a matter of weeks after birth. Their only desire is to kill, and all other base needs are bred out of them to the point where the only sustenance they require is a powerful drug called "The White" that they are designed to require. Though they have minds of their own, they are bred to have little free will or value for their own lives, to a point where they will die if commanded to. Beyond this, they have also demonstrated a deep, if often misplaced, sense of honor that keeps them from being just another race of mindless drones, like the Borg.The forces of The Dominion fight with a brutal zealotry that comes from viewing the treacherous Founders as gods, often forcing the show's heroes to make some unfortunate decisions in an effort to level out the playing field.For these reasons, and more than I can adequately get into in just one article, I tend to view The Dominion as one of the supreme villains of the Star Trek canon. While they may not be as iconic or ingrained in our collective pop culture minds as The Klingons, The Romulans, The Borg, Khan or Q or even The Gorn (one can still hope that they're better known than the Pakleds, at least), I will always appreciate their contributions in taking Star Trek to new, albeit darker, frontiers.So, dear readers, are there any other fans of The Dominion? Or Deep Space Nine for that matter (I'd be glad to hear that more fans of this one exist!)? Are there any other underrated villains you'd love to see get more respect? Sound off in the comments below!And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my month-long tribute to my favorite underrated villains of fiction. Already I have covered one of my favorite madmen of Batman's rogue's gallery (# 5), but today I'm covering my vote for perhaps the most evil character to come from a family comedy:

If you haven't seen Galaxy Quest, see it. It's funny. It's smart. It's got the Matt Carter Seal of Approval.

He approves.

Want more than that? Fine. Galaxy Quest is a film about a bunch of washed up actors who used to be on a Star Trek like television show back in the 80's, and are now just a bunch of washed up actors on the convention circuit. One day, a group of people they think to be nerds actually reveal themselves to be aliens who not only believe the Galaxy Quest characters to be real people, but have modeled their entire culture around the show in the hopes that it would help them defeat the evil alien warlord who has devastated their planet. Comical misunderstandings and hilarity ensue, as is natural to a premise like this.

Assuming of course you consider transporter accidents and aliens turned inside out hilarity. Which it actually is, picture aside.

Sure, it's basically Three Amigos in space, and sure, it's basically just a parody of Star Trek and the culture that surrounds Trek fandom, but deeper down it is so much more than these. It's one of the funniest and best-written ensemble comedies of the past 20 years, with an amazing cast (Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Tony Shaloub, Sam Rockwell) and a surprisingly dark, adult tone for what was otherwise marketed as a family film (though this probably has more to do with the fact that it was actually filmed as a PG-13, less family-oriented film and was edited down after the fact).

Family film!

My favorite element that inexplicably survived the film's sanitization would have to be the film's villain, Sarris, who in spite of the film's family leaning tone is both evil and pretty damn scary.

As evidenced by his way of dealing with underlings who displease him.

From the start, we get a pretty good idea that Sarris is a bad guy. He's slimy. He's covered in armor. He's surrounded by minions. Those who wish to oppose him live in absolute fear of the man. But lots of villains can inspire this kind of response. No, to get to the truly evil depths of Sarris, you have to look at the stuff they try to sneak on by. Like when the Thermians are first describing their plight, and Jason Nesmith (Allen) is hungover and passing out on them, we hear mentions of terrible experiments being done on the Thermian people, not to mention the atrocities performed on their women.

For the record, these are Thermians.

Further clues are given when we see what remains of the Thermian homeworld. This joke isn't really pointed out, it's more in passing than anything, but it's still something alarming to note.

The ship in the foreground kind of destroys the shot, but you get the idea.

Throughout the film, Sarris demonstrates himself to be a violent sadist, torturing multiple characters physically (electrocuting them, threatening to throw them out an airlock) and mentally (forcing Jason to admit to the Thermian captain that Galaxy Quest is fictional, causing him to lose all hope). And, (SPOILER ALERT), if it weren't for some convenient time travel, he would have gotten away with murdering all the main characters and crashing a spaceship into Earth at high warp. which if Star Trek has taught us anything would be very dangerous.He hasn't been told he's in a family movie, and he relishes every minute of his pure evil. The true depth of his awfulness is best summed up in this brief exchange from early in the movie, where we are treated to a video of his negotiation with the previous Thermian captain.

CAPTAIN: I have told you all I know. If you have any mercy in you, please let me die!SARRIS: I will let you die when the sounds you make cease to amuse me.

Dear lord, how the hell was this ever marketed as a family film?So, dear readers, are there any other fans of Galaxy Quest? Are there any other underrated villains you'd love to see get more respect? Sound off in the comments below! And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

You know, normally I like to theme my monthly pop-culture lists to something related to the month, but every once in a while I'm completely lost for ideas and have to just make something up. This is going to be one of those months. Not that there aren't some wonderful things related to March, but none of them really grabbed me this time around, so I looked to my current writing project for inspiration. Currently, I am writing a novel I'm calling After School Special, which is about the trials and tribulations of a group of aspiring supervillains in a world that has pretty much forgotten what they are. This has gotten me thinking about a lot of my favorite villains, a lot of whom don't get the praise I think they deserve, and I wanted to dedicate this month to them. (And yes, I'm aware that within their own fandoms a lot of these villains are quite popular or notable, so much of this series is going to involve me shouting to the world villains who I think everyone should be aware of for how scary, intelligent, odd or just flat out awesome they are.) And so, let us begin this list, with one of the dark sheep of Batman's Rogue's Gallery:

No, I'm not Johnny Depp, but thanks for asking!

There's no questioning that Batman has the most iconic rogue's gallery in comics history (sorry Supes, Spidey!). His list of villains ranks among some of the greatest villains put to page, and some of the most identifiable by the most casual of fans. The Joker. Catwoman. The Penguin. Two Face. Poison Ivy. Mr. Freeze. The Riddler. Bane. The Scarecrow. Hell, maybe even Zsasz or R'as al Ghul if you're a big enough fan of Batman Begins. All of them are easy enough for people to call up because they've been villains of the movies, from the great...

...to the not so great...

Yes, I went after low-hanging fruit for this joke.

...to the, well, I really don't know what to call the Adam West period, so I'll let you make your own joke. In fact, this rogue's gallery is so expansive, that there are many great villains that the films haven't had the time to touch. Sure, they may have silly names like Clayface, Killer Croc, Man-Bat and Maxie Zeus, but they are colorful and dangerous characters who deserve more attention and note than they've been shown.

Okay, maybe not Maxie Zeus.

But why, of all of them have I chosen to highlight the tiny and silly-looking Mad Hatter? Well, for a couple reasons...

The fact that he can look like this certainly helps.

First, because depending on the interpretation, he's one of Batman's sadder and more relatable villains. In the exquisite Batman: The Animated Series, he was a pitiful, meek little scientist who just wanted to impress a girl (named Alice, naturally) who would otherwise have had nothing to do with him. Using some experimental mind control technology and dressing up like his favorite Lewis Carroll character, he makes many people in town act like he's a celebrity, which does, in its own twisted way, impress Alice. However, when she reconnects with her old boyfriend, Tetch loses his mind in a fit of jealousy and tries to brainwash her to love him. As usual in awkward social situations like this, the timely intervention of Batman telling Tetch that brainwashing Alice is the exact opposite of what he wanted gets through to him. Well, that, and Batman beating the ever-loving crap out of him. Defeated and weighed down by a giant, novelty Jabberwocky statue (it's Gotham, just go with me on this one), Tetch sorrowfully sings the Mock Turtle song to himself upon realizing how awful what he did really was.

Being voiced by Roddy McDowell didn't hurt either.

The second reason I've always thought the Hatter was underrated was, well, because under the right circumstances, he could easily be Batman's most dangerous villain. His mind control technology is damned powerful (he's taken over Batman on more than a few occasions), and if placed correctly there is nothing to say he couldn't take over any of the most powerful heroes in the DC Universe. Only his lack of ambition, and absolute madness brought on by subjecting himself to his own technology, has kept him from being among the most powerful villains in the DC Universe.

Madness often prevents the best of us from achieving our goals.

I know he's a bit too silly to ever do in a modern, ultra-serious Batman movie, and it's probably for the best we never got to see Joel Schumacher get his hands on him, but I will always hold a soft spot in my villain-loving heart for this sad little man in his giant, mind-controlling hat. So, dear readers, are there any other fans of this villainous Mad Hatter? Are there any other underrated villains you'd love to see get more respect? Sound off in the comments below! And as always, please drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter! I'm big into liking/following back!

Author

Matt Carter is an author of Horror, Sci-Fi, and yes even a little bit of Young Adult fiction. Along with his wife, F.J.R. Titchenell, he is represented by Fran Black of Literary Counsel and lives in the usually sunny town of San Gabriel, CA.